Tuesday Newsday: The ends of several eras

The plastic guitar game may have falling from its once lofty pedestal, but Harmonix, the legendary studio that made Guitar Hero for Activision and then Rock Band for Electronic Arts, never stopped supporting their flagship franchise.

Harmonix has decided that 275 consecutive weeks of Rock band DLC is enough.

Harmonix has offered new downloadable songs every week for an unbelievable 275 continuous weeks - 4,000 tracks in total, and they never missed a single week. Sadly, this era is coming to a close, with Harmonix announcing that April will mark the end of regular DLC.

All is not lost, however, as Harmonix has given fans some reason for hope in an open letter to the community. "While we’re no longer actively pursuing content for release, we still have the technical capability should the right band and the right opportunity arise," the statement said. "We don’t have anything planned for release at the moment, but it’s not something we’ve ruled out."

The final Rock Band song will go online on 2 April, including "what we feel is an appropriate track for the final release". Place your bets, everyone. End of the Line by the Travelling Wilburys? Final Countdown by Europe? I'm Outta Here by Shania Twain?

Seven year old becomes youngest ever mobile game developer

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Got a great idea for a mobile game that you just know could be bigger than Angry Birds if you could find the time to make it? Well, prepare to feel even more like a woeful under-achiever: a seven year old girl in a science and technology school for gifted children in the US has almost certainly just become the youngest person ever to make a complete, playable mobile game.

The exact details are a little murky, mostly because mainstream newspapers have been reporting on it and mangling the technical specifics, but it seems that Zora Ball of the Harambee Institute of Science and Technology Charter School in Philadelphia made a complete and playable mobile touch-screen game from scratch as a school project.

I did some digging, but I couldn't find official confirmation that the game had been published in a service like the iOS App Store of Android's Google Play. Whatever the specifics are, it's still an impressive achievement. Apparently, the school not only teaches lots of science, maths, and technology, but it also instils children with a love of learning.

Here's to you Zora; I hope you'll have a big, bright future.

Planescape: Torment to get an unofficial sequel with the original designer on board

The new game will be a "spiritual sequel" rather than a true official follow-up, not least because they are leaving the original's D&D setting behind and shifting the action to the freshly-Kickstarted world (and rule-set) of Numenara, designed by roleplaying game legend Monte Cook. Since they do not have the rights to the original name, the new game has been called Torment: Tides of Numenara.

Despite the shift of setting, the new RPG rules, and the loss of the official licence, the designers promise that this game will go on asking the questions that were so central in Planescape: Torment: What is life? What is the nature of a living being? Does a single life matter?

A decade ago, when the idea that websites run by amateurs and semi-professionals could give gaming news and criticism comparable to our beloved magazines, one of the great examples was 1Up.com. Amid a depressingly large amount of quick-fix journalism and dodgy writing, 1Up was a example of how to do gaming news professionally.

Sadly, 1Up is no more, as parent company Ziff-Davis has decided to reshuffle its assets and consolidate its brands. In one fell swoop, 1Up.com, GameSpy.com, and UGO.com were all closed down. Staff were either let go or rolled into existing staff at Ziff-Davis's flagship gaming news site IGN.

There isn't a lot of money in games journalism, so I am sure it is sound business to roll multiple brands into one, but it is still a sad loss for fans of quality games criticism.